I like how they added "those who know about the findings" in parentheses. That way when students come across an expert who believes in evolution they can just say, "Oh, you must not know about the latest findings."

One doesn't believe in scientific theories. You prove or disprove them. Evolution stands because it's the best explaination we have for what we have observed. Don't use words like believe, there's no magic sky fairies involved here.

It was explained to me recently (I can get a link if needed) that the commandments are a cornerstone of all Christians, but also that there are situations where it is allowable to go against them, because Jesus died for our sins.

God condemns Adam and Eve. But for what? Eating of a fruit which granted them knowledge of good and evil. Them being able to discern the difference between good and evil was so egregious that he kicked them out of Eden and cursed them and their offspring. Then, some thousands of years later, he chooses to communicate a message. The core of that message? Knowledge of good (God) and evil (Satan). He's literally giving you a manuscript to do exactly what he cursed your ancestors for doing. God needs therapy.

Look, I'm a dad. I have great love for my children. At no point would I find a reason to justify a punishment of torture which lasts for eternity. Even if they grew up and killed, some part of me would be sad, another part would still try to see the good. Keep them locked up and away from people but not tortured...not for eternity.

Like the old argument. God made heaven and hell. God is the only reason it exists. He alone has the power to put you there and take you from there. Even Jesus got to leave hell, god has the power to remove you too. But he is content for you to remain there. Tortured, for eternity.

A christian well-versed in apologetics would say that the crime was the disobedience. They would also say the command was given so that humanity might remain innocent. Before, they were as children. Anything they did would be forgiven, because they didn't know right from wrong. Once they ate, they knew. They covered themselves in shame, and hid from god.

It's a good thing the literal rules are so confusingly interpreted to reach a meaningless conclusion, otherwise we might reach conclusions using other methods and who knows what kinda crazy stuff we'd come up with!

Because in medieval times priests would leave their parishes and its associated lands and wealth to their sons. The Pope at the time wanted absolute control over who became a priest and the land and wealth that came with it. So no babies for you.

Even if we could point to the LAST specific pair bond of animals whose whelping of offspring directly resulted in the entirety of our species' presence in the world to call our "Adam and Eve", sin still doesn't exist. You can't look at sin with a magnifying glass or wrap it in a box and mail it somewhere. It's an abstract concept that must be subjectively applied as a value judgement by a sapient creature that has decided on what, exactly, "sin" means.

We have no reason to suspect that a rock would cease existing or fail to exist in the first place without someone being aware of it; anyone who suddenly enters the space that the rock inhabits would be able to tell that there's a dense and rigid mass of mineral elements there, whether or not a word like "rock" is how they would label it;

Sin, though, takes up no space, contains no mass, nor interacts with fields or particles. It is fundamentally impossible to "encounter" sin.

There were actually a couple of sects that took this to heart in the 1600's in england (probably elsewhere but i only know of specific sects in england). Full on orgies and everything. They figured, we're all predestined one way or another, might as well have a good ass time while we can. The name of the group escapes me though.

Nah jesus gave us two rules. Love your god and love your neighbor. Some asshole got it in his head that they felt compelled to do gods work by saving people from hell and the only way to do that was for everybody to be exactly like them regardless of how good for society they may be.

Also Jesus was a rebel. If going out and helping the sick, poor or outcast interrupted your temple and worship It was considered blasphemous. He blasphemed against the original jewish order (which also threatened the roman empire).

Im a catholic that likes to see what you peeps are talking about from time to time out of general curiosity. I always try to distinguish fundamentalism from the rest of christianity.

Without "sin", the church would be useless. Therefore, the church must define "sin", define actions against "sin", sell the guidebook against "sin", and request reasonable payments over a person's life to keep them away from "sin".

From a marketing standpoint, you could replace the word in quotations with about any buzzword and have a good game plan to make a decent profit.

Edit: I had to include a quote for good measure: "I'm going back to Jersey and start up the business again. I can kick the sh*t out of little kids in Red Bank and make myself a profit."

Okay I dont get this, ive lived in texas all my life, granted in the metroplex but still, all my science teachers openly accepted and agreed with evolution, I only ever had one crazy christian teacher who luckily did teach evolution honestly, though I doubt she agreed with it. I never got fed creationism by any teacher even openly christian ones. I feel like these cases in the south of teachers trying to argue evolution or teach creationism are isolated incidents.

I lived in east Texas and had a sixth grade teacher inform us that it was perfectly acceptable to refuse to answer TAAS (previous version of Texas standardized test) science questions that didn't align with our (overwhelmingly christian) religious views.

A lot of the more serious Incidents are isolated or exaggerated, but there are a lot of people that have no problem misrepresenting or flat out misdirecting their students.

This just seems morally and ethically wrong, id think that someone dedicated to educating young minds wouldnt do this but I guess in their head theyre doing that they think is right. Its just sad, im thankful for my teachers who chose to educate me truthfully and kept their own views out of it, though the vast majority of my science teachers whole heartedly believed what they taught regardless.

You seem to have missed the bit where the Texas School Board voted for years to have evolution edited out of the approved text books, and similar.

This was an even wider problem than Texas because it's influence on publishers was such that other states would be obliged to put up with Texas' shit on this issue and buy the same crippled text books.

(Although, I've always thought that was a douche-bag approach by the publishers.)

I hadnt heard of this ... my last year of high school was advanced placenent enviromental sciences which my teacher basically had to get the class funded through this whole google fund thing, she was one of the most amazing teachers ive had and our textbook wasnt a state text book as far as I know?! It might have been but it had plenty on evolution when discussing species and different impacts enviromental damage had, nothing about creationism. And none of my textbooks as far as I can remember did either. So this really sucks for the next generation that this Is happening, youd think as time goes on wed be progressive and fight creationism in our schools but it seems to be getting pushed harder lately. I really hope somethings done, dont want my future children being fed creationism :x

I wish this was true. Where I live in Texas it's a rarity to find science teachers that believe in evolution. My biology teacher didn't try to teach creationism instead or anything, she just told the entire class before starting the unit that she didn't believe in evolution and then did a really shitty job teaching it. Schools in my area can barely find teachers in the first place though, so they hire anyone, qualified or not, to teach science (my physics teacher had a degree in theological studies or something). The metroplex is generally more competent than much of the rest of the state though, so it's likely teachers are better there.

My science teacher taught evolution with pizazz and made it entertaining. He spent about 20 minutes total on creationism by starting with something along the lines of "And now for the state mandated blah blah blah" and moved on quickly after. At the time I was pissed as a christian, looking back I get frustrated that I didn't pay more attention and become as passionate as I could have been. Luckily I still talk to him and he's still one of the greatest influences in my life.

I want that to be the case, but it is Texas that decides what will be in the national textbooks, and they have re-written history, among other things, to be absolute bullshit. I wasn't educated in Texas, but rather, in Tn, from the middle of 6th grade on. I was never fed creationism, either, but the times, they have changed, and not for the better. I fear for my new granddaughter; she will likely be ostracized for not believing with the masses. :-(

I went to University in Arkansas, and freshman year was in a lecture-style Biological Anthropology class. On day one, the professor says, "If you have a problem with evolution, you'll have a hard time in this class. I suggest you leave now and go register for something else for your science credit."

I shit you not, a third of the roughly 200 students in that lecture hall got up and left.

I was dumbfounded, but the lab instructor later told me that was the standard reaction every first semester.

This was in pretty much all my science related books, but i was sent to a private christian school. Funny thing is, if they didn't lie to me so hard about evolution, I might not have thrown the whole religion away when I found out we were wrong.

Can anyone play this game? I feel the need to start distributing fliers that read, "Thanks to divine revelation and a more detail-oriented reading of scripture, most evangelical baptists, missionaries, and Christian leaders now fully accept and support evolutionary teaching and incorporate it within sermons on a regular basis."

I'll title it "Saint Darwin: The 13th Apostle", and let everyone know that scripture explicitly endorses the findings of biologists the world over. Also, that Satan has been creating the illusion of intelligent design to trick guillable and test those of true faith.

"As a result, most [science types] (who are know about the findings) now reject evolution".

Emphasis mine.

Which scientists are going to be aware of hokum like this? The ones who are strict creationists-- otherwise, they aren't going to be aware of the study (excepting those told by said scientists or as a joke/TIL kinda thing). No one from the rational world is going to stumble across that... Doubt it's even peer reviewed. Made up equations wither under strict scrutiny. So the scientists that are aware of it now reject evolution-- they still do, and they used to, too. One didn't necessarily cause the other.

So you can play that game, but your statements aren't following the rules.

Yup, it's a type of no true scotsman assertion meaning it's essentially non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong. Also it only holds true in its weak form if the claim isn't widely published, like on reddit say.

I feel like the phrase "Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" is applicable here... Rates of people accepting science are steadily increasing. The high road is working just fine.

Also, strangely lies. George Smoot at UC Berkeley did make some great discoveries of the size of the universe, but he didn't "mark the edges" as I think this small excerpt says (granted, it's hard to read with the edges cut off). Smoot and other astrophysicists/cosmologists provided a higher resolution map of the extent of the visible universe, providing more detailed evidence of its expansion. There's a difference between a marked edge and the end of visibility. Here is his bio page from the lab he works at.

I wish it was true. Not knowing this specific book, but generally they get something which is 90% good science and just twist the bits that don't suit them. Just making 100% up from scratch is much harder to defend.

How the fuck does garbage like this get published? Can I write a book about how my dick created the universe, and how astronomers have all observed that the blackness of space is really just my pubes, and get it published too?

we can calculate the likelihood of random development of a cell as claimed by evolution.

I find this part even more infuriating as it shows a pathetic ignorance of probabilities and statistics. The (prior) probability that any individual wins the Powerball jackpot is ~1 in 175 million. Ergo, according to the "logic" displayed above, God must be behind Powerball.

Evolution doesn't say anything about cells developing at random. There's a reason the book is called the "Origin of Species" and not the "Origin of Life". Evolution is only concerned with how life changes over time, not how it initially started.

I have left reddit for a reddit alternative due to years of admin mismanagement and preferential treatment for certain subreddits and users holding certain political and ideological views.

The situation has gotten especially worse since the appointment of Ellen Pao as CEO, culminating in the seemingly unjustified firings of several valuable employees and bans on hundreds of vibrant communities on completely trumped-up charges.

The resignation of Ellen Pao and the appointment of Steve Huffman as CEO, despite initial hopes, has continued the same trend.

As an act of protest, I have chosen to redact all the comments I've ever made on reddit, overwriting them with this message.

Finally, click on your username at the top right corner of reddit, click on the comments tab, and click on the new OVERWRITE button at the top of the page. You may need to scroll down to multiple comment pages if you have commented a lot.

I also find that sentence infuriating, but mostly because it states that evolution makes the claim that cells developed by random chance. Evolution makes no such claim. Certain individual mutations may occur through random chance, but the development of cells came from the competition of for resources by replicating groups of self-organizing molecules. Sort of the exact opposite of random chance.

What's the chance of you getting a hand of all the same suite (i.e. all aces, or all spades...) in order from 1-K? The odds are hundreds of billions to one, almost impossible for any practical purpose.

But what's the chance of getting another random, meaningless order of thirteen other cards? It's the same odds, billions to one.

No matter how unlikely something or a group of things is in a range of possibilities, the end result must always pick one. This makes seemingly impossible things commonplace.

There's a field of math/science called "statistical thermodynamics" that deals with this if you're interested :)

Hmmm... I seem to get a different answer. If we want a specific suit (say all diamonds) in order (Ace, 2, 3, ... Q, K), there is a 1/52 chance of getting the Ace of Diamonds first. Then there is a 1/51 chance of getting the 2 of Diamonds, etc. The odds of getting that specific suit in order is 1 in 3,954,242,643,911,240,000,000. Divide by 4 because we aren't specific to a suit, and I got to 1 in 988,560,660,977,910,000,000.

I also got to the same answer in a different way that may make more intuitive sense. The first card must be an ace (regardless of suit). The probability of getting an ace first draw is 4/52. The next card must be the 2 of that suit, which has probability 1/51. Similarly, the third card has probability 1/50, and so on. Multiply all of these probabilities to get the same 1 in 988,560,660,977,810,000,000.

To add to ParagaonRenegade's answer: this sort of statistical hand waving also depends on the assumption that all possible outcomes are equally likely.

In other words, these people are assuming that if you have a container of 20 different kinds of amino acids (protein building blocks) and the conditions are right for them to form chains, they will associate completely randomly, i.e. any pair of amino acids are as likely to bond together and form a chain link as any other pair. The creationist then reasons, there's too many billions or trillions of possible sequences, how could we "randomly" get the exact sequence of a critical protein like cytochrome c (~100 aminos long)? It's impossible, evolution is foiled again!

The problem is, anyone who has bothered to learn even the basics of biochemistry could tell you intuitively that this is a painfully stupid assumption (different kinds of amino acids have very distinct chemical properties that make them behave characteristically when in close proximity to certain chemical groups on other amino acids). Actual research backs this up, amino acids don't like to just link up in any old order, and there's also things like pH and catalysts and substrates and sunlight and other impurities in the solution to consider.

Another interesting example of this is Levinthal's Paradox. Basically, proteins that start out as string-like molecules have to fold into a correct 3D shape to do their work, like so. If you were to assume proteins did this in a completely random fashion, then even with some pretty charitable estimations, it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of 1074 years, or about 72,307,692,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 times longer than our universe has existed for even one small protein to sample all the available 3D shapes in an attempt to find the right one. That's for a small protein like cytochrome c, some proteins are as much as 300x larger, and so would take exponentially longer to fold by this random method.

The reality is, small proteins like cytochrome c are usually able to fold correctly in thousandths or millionths of a second. And this is precisely because all the possible 3D conformations are not equally likely. Some shapes take much less energy to fold into and maintain than the others, and this fact by itself causes many proteins to relatively automatically fold into the right shape (although some do need "help" to do it right).

When I was a kid in school in the 50's and 60's, there was never any of all this creation crap we have today. I learned biology and evolution theory all through school. Now this creation stuff is all over the place; what changed? Why are we going backwards?

Because they KNOW their religion is bullshit, and they know the stories told in the bible are lies. BUT, they are GOOD lies, so it's OK to spread them.

Because they fully understand that religions constantly lies to them, it makes absolute sense that they also reject everything science says (basically), because that have no "base line" of what is true.

Science "lies" are BAD lies, as opposed to Christian lies which are GOOD, so it's OK to tell and repeat these good lies in order to bring people into the fold.

This should be a punishable crime. The fact that there will be ignorant people walking around and possibly making decisions that will effect the rest of us and our sons should be enough reason to punish spreading missleading information with books used to educate children. Ignorance is dangerous.

i'm a musician who does arranging and i used to do some work for a prominent xtian artist....he is a pianist. his schtick was basically to emulate liberace who made a decent living out of doing pop arrangements in the style of rachmaninoff, chopin, etc. lots of arpeggios, basically. the difference being, that liberace knew what he was emulating and could, at one time, play it. but this guy i worked for could only emulate the emulation. his music was, therefore, soulless. it was a caricature of itself. instead of knowing rachmaninoff and using those isms, he listened to rachmaninoff and only heard arpeggios. and what's more, he didn't even care to look into it because his musical point wasn't music, it was "preaching the gospel."

that story is relevant here because i see it as the same thing when it comes to xtian authors writing absurd shit. they read the bible and see the absurd shit written there and think that "man's wisdom is folly to god, and god's wisdom is man's folly." in other words, they read this crazy stuff and think, "hell...how hard can it be? god is a mystery and since i have it in my mind to write it down, it must be another one of those 'mysteries'." they have no idea what they're reading in the bible, they have no idea how it came to be, what the conventions are, and how difficult it is to understand the historical context of any of the stuff in the bible...all they see is gibberish. and so they think that they can spout gibberish too because, well, god.

the statement highlighted in the OP seems to be one of those kinds of things. the virtue in it, for the author, is in the exaggerated outlandishness of the claim. they read outlandish stuff all the time...this is nothing to them.

TL;DR: to me, this is where the deep disconnect lives in modern fundagelicalism: they do not know what they do not know...and they can't tell one thing from another because of that. so not only can they not properly understand the bible's very complicated context amid all the cognitive dissonance that trying to understand the bible brings, they believe that cognitive dissonance is a sign that god is in it.

even further TL;DR: a cursory reading of the bible seems to imply that god speaks only outlandish gibberish that masquerades as "deep, profound truth"...and so to speak the mind of god, one must speak outlandish gibberish too.

And they use the word "scientist" very loosely: basically anyone with an advanced degree. Often, they're trained in fields that have nothing to do with biology, genetics, comparative biology, or evolution. Just as I'm not qualified to argue about string theory, physicists aren't particularly well-placed to argue about evolutionary theory.

It seems the best thing one can do in the face of this is just take comfort in the fact that you have a staggering amount of facts, figures, and statistics on your side that can refute biased and ignorant claims such as this. It's not about telling someone that they're wrong, but explaining why they are wrong.

it is worded horribly, by saying "most [scientists] (that know about the findings" it sounds like they mean "most [scientists]" when actually they are saying "most [scientists that believe some bullshit findings]"